To think that the most important thing young people need to learn isn’t academics but emotional intelligence?

[WiseRoseFatball]

School teaches maths, science and history but one of the most important life skills - understanding your own emotions and navigating interpersonal relationships, is rarely a focus. AIBU to think that emotional intelligence is just as, if not more, important than traditional subjects?

Do you think lack of emotional intelligence is a new problem? Did people in previous generations have it, and now it's declined so we need to take steps to address it?

This stuff comes from the home. I mean they do teach about relationships and practical life skills in personal development. But it’s not something that can really be taught. It has to be modelled by people close to the child. A good look at the sorts of parents my dc goes to school with is definitely a sign that emotional intelligence is not being modelled in the home. But we’ve used other people’s poor behaviour and choices as teachable moments and I do talk through how things could have been handled better. Not everyone comes from a stable happy home though and it’s hard to make up for that in school. They aren’t miracle workers.

I don’t think lack of emotional intelligence is new exactly but the world young people are growing up in now is very different. In previous generations, there were clearer scrips for how to live - structured roles, stable jobs, predictable life stages. That kind of social scaffolding often masked emotional gaps. You didn't necessarily need to be emotionally fluent if life just moved you from one unexpected step to the next.

Now, people have more freedom but also more uncertainty. Relationships are more complex, workplaces more fluid and social pressures amplified by the internet. Without the tools to understand themselves or relate to others in healthy ways, young people can flounder - even if they’re academically bright.

So it’s not that past generations had it all figured out but I think the consequences of poor emotional awareness hit harder today. That’s why I think we need to be more intentional about teaching it now.

Sure, but it's just as unlikely that teachers (who are, after all, also just adults) will have these skills themselves, far less be able to pass them on in the artificial collective setting of the classroom.

I do have both types of intelligence, and think that I'm far better positioned to teach and model for DS the processes of recognising, navigating and managing emotions, DH likewise.

As it stands, “Emotional Literacy” is taught to the children deemed to need it most, at least in is in the six or so schools I’ve visited in the past couple of years in my city. As the evidence shows above, it’s not really had a great effect so maybe we need to look more at how these skills are embedded throughout the curriculum rather than teaching them explicitly at the cost of another subject. The reality is that in an ideal world, people would have academic AND emotional literacy, we need both, not one or the other.

I’ve taught myself it so I think it can be done. It’s just about how your brain works, how humans are programmed, chimp paradox stuff.

I don’t think so but it’s better to have a mentally healthy generation, so women who understand why they can’t get away from violent men for example, why people behave as they do, why they behave as they do, where anxious thoughts come from.

schools didn’t previously kids about drugs and coercive control, both those things existed . I didn’t get sex education. Lessons other than it’s a sin, number of girls who collected their gcse results in pregnancy dungarees may have suggested that it would have been a good idea not to demonise sex.

Resilience, nuance and pragmatism are essential skills to help navigate through life. But rarely focussed on as desirable.

Why frame these sese of knowledge as more / less important? It's not either/or - they are all important.

I don't see why schools are held responsible for teaching everything children might need - they are only there for part of their daily life (I seem to remember seeing a 20% stat floating around).

It’s a job for the parents not school.

Yes, I completely agree. I think as we progress as a society we rightly identify areas in which we could 'do better' and introduce them. I was just curious as to whether the OP thought there was a new and emerging need for this that was absent in previous generations. Which she has confirmed she does, because she believes there are new and more challenging pressures. Its that part I'm not sure I agree with, as i don't really recognise the more straightforward society of yesterday that she describes, but am open minded, and interested in other people's views.